Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
The Neural Archive is a repository of publications collected by us during the years. Browse our collection here.
Sometimes the online world reveals unsuspected parallel dimensions. This is an unknown restyle of Neural independently (and secretly as we never knew about it) made by NY-based Motion and Graphic Designer, Clarke Blackham. Very nicely made, perhaps only a bit glossier for the magazine’s line, it testifies once more how even your most familiar outcomes can have another life somewhere else.
The value of craft after software sounds rampant sometimes, expressing the freedom of escaping repetitive taps and clicks to accomplish some assumed tasks. Mixing media, electricity, electronics, mechanics and inert objects Graham Dunning has realised a structured track/performance/open script in his “Mechanical Techno: Ghost in the Machine Music.” More than a proof of concept a machine music declination.
Isn’t ASCII Art a perfect form of “graffiti” in 2010s? The 8-bit aesthetics is among the strongest visual references connecting the analogue recent past with the omni-digital present, so why not adopt it to finally have some public art embedded in the present? In Varberg, Sweden, 2016, the GOTO80 crew (feat: Karin Andersson) did it, choosing (not by accident) the Mo Soul Amiga-font.
YesNo by Timo Kahlen feels like “traditional” net art, a well crafted stuck webpage for the user’s aural and clickable enjoyment.
The relationship between Andy Warhol and personal computers (becoming quite popular during his last years) has been only partially investigated beyond his Amiga works. In November 2015, Sotheby’s sold his “Apple (from Ads)” (acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas) for 910.000 USD, and in catalogue’s notes Warhol tells about his meeting with Steve Jobs insisting to give him one and showing him how to draw (even if still in black and white): “we went into Sean [John Lennon’s son]’s bedroom–and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color…I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it.”
Harsh Noise Wally, is a sophisticated mashup mixing strips of Wally, the lazy and cynic colleague of Dilbert with some epic noise music extreme attitudes. Well conceived and assembled.
Minority Report comes closer… Three huge screens at Birmingham New Street railway station are scanning passers-by and play advertisements accordingly. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/new-street-station-advertising-screens-9920400
GoPro ancestors in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly sport and movie persons like F1 driver Jackie Stewart, Bob Sinclair and Steve McQueen.
Sound Development, ISBN: 978-8480265393, English, 263 pages, 2016, Switzerland
This is another expedition organised by Sound Development, and another thirteen sound artists, landing this time in Belgrade and Athens, two very symbolic cities for current times. This printed and, →
LP – D’Autres Cordes
Electronics, electroacoustics, noise and contemporary music: this is the special mix created by Franck Vigroux in Rapport Sur Le Désordre. This production includes four tracks per side and is an ideal prosecution of Centaure, an audio-visual →
The use of industrial robots in art usually takes advantage of the powerful aesthetic values transmitted by their sheer force, usually mediated by an alien mechanic elegance. In installations, they’re protected from the audience for security reasons, and that just →
Gruenrekorder, ISBN 978-3-00-052370-0, Huao, Basque, Spanish and English, 176 pages, 2016, Germany
In the product page on the label’s website the description of this release ends with this warning: “Partially legible. Sunlight reading recommended”. It’s hard to fail recognising that →
CD + DVD + book – Unsounds
Anne-James Chaton, Thurston Moore and Andy Moor have worked together for this release, whose artwork cannot remain indifferent. On the cover is printed the title of the project, Heretics. While opening the hardback, →
Earnings, concentration, effectiveness, well-being. Is not this what chases the western culture? Are these not the bases around which revolve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people? And while phones, home automation devices and cars are becoming more intelligent, →
D21 Kunstraum Leipzig, ISBN-13: 978-3000505027, English, 136 pages, 2015, Germany
The strategical importance of databases for our society has been acknowledged since their explosion in size and the creation of tools to cross-search a number simultaneously. In our current scenario →
SD Card – RecursosRenovables
We open a strange package, made with scraps of comic books and wrapped in a yellow plastic tape. It’s the tape commonly used for building construction or in case of car accident, and all over it →
From Russia has arrived FindFace, one of the most controversial free software of the recent scene: a facial recognition App that allows users of Vkontakte, Facebook Russian brother with 210 million members, to discover the identity of a person from →
The Mit Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262029575, English, 502 pages, 2016, USA
In the book The Stack, On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin Bratton (professor of Visual Arts and the Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, →
CD – Denovali
Elysian Park is the third album of Franz Kirmann, a French producer based in London, and is also his second release with the record company Denovali. The work includes fourteen tracks and follows “Hyper Trophies”, an installation →
Medicine and music have an intertwined history, going back to shamanic traditions that live on within contemporary practices aiming to heal body and mind through sound. Michele Spanghero taps into this notion obliquely with “Ad lib.”, a disquieting sound sculpture →
Routledge, ISBN-13: 978-0415843058, English, 220 pages, 2016, USA
The most popular theoretical investigations in this second half of the 2010s are mostly tied up with our closest devices (smartphones) and their most used software (social media), untangling our new media →
12” vinyl – Kvitnu
Ilpo Väisänen was mostly known as one of the two founders of Pan Sonic. He was not very productive as a solo artist: we mostly remember his work in bands such as Angel, Fistpost, IBM, Rude →
